Tag Archives: MULYP

These guys attended Memphis Urban League Young Professionals’ annual Spooktacular Costume Party. The pair are dressed up as Prince Akeem of Zamunda in his McDowell’s uniform (check the pompom on his hat) and Darryl Jenks, Prince of Soul Glo, in his buppie douche uniform (complete with two tickets for the Jets game and a strawberry milkshake).

This is why I *heart* Halloween. It brings out the best in people.

Me with the Spooktacular poster I designed.

Who was I? An ’80s aerobics instructor. I had fun putting on all that blue eyeshadow. Then I had a hell of a time taking it off!

This is my latest design for Memphis Urban League Young Professionals. The flyer is for their upcoming Spooktacular costume benefit, and looks nothing like what I first envisioned for this project. I took on the assignment on Friday, and it had to be completed by Sunday, so I had to ruthlessly abandon some of the concepts I had in mind if they weren’t working as well as I hoped or would take longer than the time allotted.

I sketched out a few ideas Friday night and found a couple of photos to get me started. Don’t hold your breath for those sketches. I’ll save myself the embarrassment.

In the beginning, I wanted to do a play on the Dirty Martini cover above using legs in witch stockings. I found the pair below, but with all that exposed thigh (yeah, I know I could crop it out, and did so), the image felt too sexy for a civic organization fundraiser.

Later Friday night I was told the colors for the party were orange, fuschia, green and turquoise, so I had my palette, and most of the decor would be skeletons. Good thing that I’d already started playing with the idea of using x-rays or bones in some capacity. One of the first bony images I swiped was this:

With the help of the pen tool and the Glowing Outlines filter in Photoshop, that turned into this:

On Saturday, I felt kind of meh about the whole x-ray/bones thing until I found this:

Still a bit on the sexy side, I cropped out the rest of this x-rayed pin-ups body from the mid-thigh up, added a turquoise neon glow and a martini glass, and ended up with these:

As you can see, there’s a lot wrong with the placement of the legs. It’s really evident in the last two. It could’ve worked if one leg had been lower than the other, or higher, in the case of the original. This was one of the ideas I’m going to have to revisit at some point. Maybe for an after hours med school mixer.

On Sunday, I scrapped everything. Sure the other ideas were fun, bony and ghoulish, but nothing said “costume party”. In an effort to try something new, stumbled across this dude:

Edited out his scythe:

Then put a drink in his hand:

My effort to make him more festive kinda failed:

Still, I liked the result I got from cutting out and painting the harlequin mask, and the lip and stem of the martini glass were transparent so I knew I could put it against any background and it would render correctly. Instead of going with a character, I took those two elements which clearly conveyed cocktails and costumes, and put them together (altering the perspective on the mask of course).

After that decision was made, everything else fell into place. Kind of. The logos took a ton of time, and I hadn’t anticipated that. I had to cut some of them out, hunt for others online, size them all, then figure out how to place them evenly (the alignment tool is my new best friend). Oh and that last stripe on the page changed from a 70% gray (taken from the ‘THE’ at the top of the page) to white since some of the logos were better suited for it:

The other thing that took a ton of time was figuring out how to work around shapes that went outside the bounding box on the art board in Illustrator. The angles in the orange and black stripes were achieved by rotating the black stripe and fooling around with the arrangement. All three stripes went out beyond the art board, so saving as a JPG inside Illustrator was a no-go. In order to constrain the final JPG to the art board, I had to save the file as a PDF, then open the PDF in Photoshop and save it as a JPG from there. I didn’t figure that out until after I tried to cover what was outside the lines with white rectangles and trying to place a frame around the art board that never quite lined up no matter how much I dialed down the nudge value.

At the end of the day, I’m pleased with the way it turned out, and from what I can tell the client is, too. I also designed some tickets for the event, but I’ll hold off on posting them since I haven’t added a watermark yet. Besides, those are a post of their own.